sábado, 24 de noviembre de 2012

iCERI2012 Conference

This week I
assisted to the iCERI2012 conference as a speeker.

There were very
interesting presentations in the sessions and as a speeker I presented the ‘Scientific
Output Portal Project’. In my case, the aim of the presentation was to illustrate
the work that is necessary to get show the scientific output of a university and to link with the open access repository of the institution, in
the specific case of the SIGMA's consortium product PPC (encode, migration and
data merge from different sources, databases data depuration, standardization
and so on). And that it’s not only about developing software, research experts
are needed both in SIGMA and in the universities to archive this goal. It’s a
complex collaboration project but which allows to archive very good and
engaging results for the university.

In general, caught my
attention moreover, to be aware of the globalization: different people from
different countries talking about the same problems and needs and of the same
or similar tools that they support to. So, nowadays there is one global problem:
‘digital divide’, in this case, applied to the educational environment.

Digital immigrant
Teachers face to face with native digital Students. Some people saw this as a thread,
but fortunately most saw this as an opportunity. An opportunity to use digital tools in class
to learn, and a close collaboration between teachers and students. Initiatives as use of wikis, e-portfolios, social media, with tablets and other
digital devices in classroom or on-line, are very very interesting, and I think
that there was cool initiatives about this. Is a clear
way to engage the new students both in the on-site classes or on-line classes.

Also spoke of other topics like the learning models, I mean: on-site, blended
or on-line learning. They showed some studies about this. I think, after see
this studies, that blended-learning (half on-site, half on-line), is the best
option nowadays.

Also they
talked about MOOCS and other current initiatives very interesting. For example,
the use of the physical distribution of classrooms, to engage the students to
work collaborative, with circular tables and without front classes. Others
talked about the intellectual protection of the research results. And about some
e-learning platforms (Moodle, Sakai, Its...)

Finally, I
want to highlight one presentation that I liked so much. An African professor
from a little village, that teaches his students with tablets, and how he makes
it. And then, sowed us the real life of this little boys and girls outside the
school. They live in poor houses and they get up in the morning and milked his
cow or take care of other farm animals (like goats...). Then they take their
tablet and go to school, to learn about new technologies and know about the
rest of, for them, very different world. It impressed me greatly.

In short, a
really exciting two days experience in a really well organized congress!, Although
I am sure that I missed other many interesting presentations. Engaging!